ABSTRACT
Cyberspace has become a dominant theme in security agendas across the world, including in Europe. In the last few years, the European Union has put forward a number of initiatives and policies to address the issue, such as the EU Cyber Security Strategy, the Network Information Security Directive and, more recently, the EU Cybersecurity Package. This chapter aims to take stock of those innovations by proposing a new reading of cybersecurity as an evolutionary policy field that, once established, becomes derivative from previous iterations. This means the constitutive moment of any security policy sediments concepts and ideas, making alternative readings more difficult to propose and implement. Acknowledging that evolutionary dimension is therefore crucial to questioning the meaning(s) of security that are embedded in an actor’s – in this case, the EU’s – approach to cyberspace. In line with a critical reading of security, it is also central for the incorporation of an alternative emancipatory agenda into the field of European cybersecurity.
